And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

My mother, like her mother before her, has a mischievously vulgar sense of humor. My sister and I inherited a fair share of the family trait as well. Strange, then, that it took me several reads of “The Cassock” before I understood that the whole chapter is about a whale’s penis.

Whaling crews include a member (no pun intended) called a mincer, who slices large pieces of blubber into thin sheets called Bible leaves (i.e., the thinner the better) to render in the try-works. Apparently, the mincer peels the skin off of the whale’s penis, stretches it out, and wears the skin to “protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.”

The skin is black, which, along with the Bible leaves reference, allows Ishmael to compare the mincer to an archbishop, portioning spirituality in the pages of his oration. Ishmael notes that only the penis skin could protect the mincer, though he leaves the questions of “how?” and “from what?” unanswered. Left so incredibly vague, though closely tied to the archbishop comparison, I couldn’t help but think of church officials as agents, wrapped in patriarchy, carefully doling out guarded selections from the knowledge of ages, protected within the wide expanse of an archbishoprick, the bigger the better.